U.S. Pat. No. 5,771,035 discloses a character generation device for producing new fonts from a basic font and paste components. The device has a shape recogniser for extracting an element of a character of the basic font and recognising it's shape. The shape recogniser determines the stroke angle of the element and the paste components are superposed at the angle matching the angle of the stroke. The device allows the easy generation of characters of a font without manually designing each character. However, this device suffers from the disadvantage that it is not possible to manipulate the stored basic font, particularly the orientation of character strokes.